I've a penchant for painting bullseyes on my forehead, so why not make my score of self-destruction 100%? Defend Israel. Let's leave aside the debate over whether Hizbullah's having gratuitously started the mayhem justifies Israel's notoriously "disproportionate" pounding of Lebanon into loose chippings (over which I am conflicted). Rather, given that hostility toward this tiny, fractious state runs high both in Britain and across Europe, let's conduct a thought experiment. How would you feel - really think about it - if Israel went away?

For its neighbours, this isn't a facetious question. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has unapologetically declared that "Israel must be wiped off the map". Both Hizbullah and Hamas are dedicated to the Jewish state's destruction. Much of the Middle East now endorses the modest proposal of reclaiming the land for Arabs and sending the Jews back where they came from. Thus Israel simply "going away" would catapult the whole region into such a celebrative lather that Muslims might reconsider the Islamic proscription of champagne.

But might the European reaction be a tad queasier? It's a token of Israel's remarkable success that we take its existence for granted. Yet this midget Jewish outpost has only been around since 1948, remaining in unremitting peril ever since. Clearly, the implicit American guarantee helps to confer the impression of Israeli invincibility - but how many other countries consistently defend the right of Israel to exist at all? Indeed, it is the very ability of this fierce people to project an image of tenacious strength - to play the mouse that roared - that facilitates Israel-bashing. The seemingly unassailable invites attack, since it's taken as a given that no matter what you hurl at it, the object of your vituperation will remain standing. (The same might be said of the United States.) Picking on entities overtly puny, tentative and threatened is far less acceptable.

Well, were Israel really "wiped from the map", I bet even virulently anti- Israel Europeans would miss it. The existence of a permanent Jewish refuge helps to ameliorate residual European guilt over the Holocaust. The sheer ferocity of the Israeli people reassures Europeans that the Jews are alive and well: "Look at them, with all those war planes! They're not endangered; they're scary!"

Even on a cultural level, if Israelis all slunk anonymously back to Poland, Russia and Ethiopia, I bet you'd miss them. Sure, the stereotype of Israelis as obnoxious, pushy, belligerent and quarrelsome is not entirely unearned. Yet like most people, what's wrong with them is also what makes them lovable. I quite fancy Israelis, even though (or perhaps because) they drive me crazy. They have bite, flavour. At least Israelis have convictions, if sometimes barmy ones. They're some of the most politicised people on earth, and relish a good argument. Unlike most states - which simply are - theirs has a purpose, even if they're constantly bickering among themselves over what that purpose is.

Moreover, while Europeans take Israel for granted, Israelis don't take Israel for granted. That's the source of the emotional disconnect. In-country, all that ostensible invincibility falls away. Israelis really do fear that any day their borders will be overrun with millions of Muslims who despise them, and whose leaders have for decades used bilious Jew-baiting to unite their peoples behind dodgy regimes. The rest of the world regards Israel as Goliath, eternally tromping on weaker adversaries with munitions overkill; the Israelis see themselves as David, whose mere survival is a miracle.

Begrudgingly admitting that maybe with Israel in it rather than disappeared the world is a more compelling place - or, even at the unfortunate cost of Palestinian displacement, more historically just - doesn't necessitate supporting its government's policies at every juncture. The country is given to military excess, and it's dead sound to object that wrecking the whole of southern Lebanon is surely too high a price to pay to check Hizbullah's kidnappings and missile attacks. But for me, the bottom line has always been that, with all its faults, I'm glad that Israel is still there.

I ran into a friend in Brooklyn on Sunday night, and he was fuming. He had arrived in JFK two hours before. Fatally, in flying from Munich, he had a stopover in Heathrow - the very word having now assumed Dante-esque overtones. No one had warned him about Heathrow's only-your-wallet-and-passport-in-a-baggie routine, and he arrived with - horrors - carry-on iPod, mobile, even the dread READING MATERIAL. He was obliged to leave the airport to buy new luggage in the rain. Security even confiscated his Listerine breath tabs - in a flat plastic box the size of a 10p piece. Defiantly, before forfeiting the strips, he ate five at once.

Now that the lunatic carry-on regulations to confront last week's scare are starting to return to the half-sane, can we agree that it's not only the Israelis whose recent reaction was "disproportionate"? Because the same security alarm bells are bound to ring again.

The plot to blow up 10 planes that MI5 supposedly foiled involved liquid explosives detonated with a commonplace electronic device like the flash on a disposable camera. Thus the no-liquids ban was sensible, likewise the ban on electronic equipment. But what was the logic to forbidding paperbacks? Newspapers? What can you do with a Danielle Steel novel - read aloud the really lousy bits and drive other passengers into a homicidal frenzy? How would my friend blow up a plane with Listerine tabs? Isn't bad breath more combustible than the minty kind?

Banishing virtually every object from the cabin was a de facto declaration of incompetence. Look, it said, we're in such a tizzy that we are no longer able to use our heads. All objects - from non-prescription medication to lipsticks - are thus equally dangerous.

Air travel having become odious enough already, airlines cannot afford to have their clientele turned into resentful zombies who are bored out of their minds. (Now that is dangerous.) In a crisis like last week's, the continued employment of intelligent discretion keeps passengers on side. Fine, everyone has to pull together and throw out their Evian. But when you take away their crosswords - which will presumably blow out the side of the plane the moment a punter makes a mistake on 58 across - you make them into enemies, and you invite their contempt.

This week Lionel read Yasunari Kawabata's novel The Master of Go, "in which conflict is resolved with the painstaking placement of black and white stones - in these times, strangely comforting". Lionel watched Oliver Stone's World Trade Center: "The first 20 minutes are terrific. The rest is schlock, and leaving the theatre that unaffected I was embarrassed."